This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost, no birth, identity, form - no object of the world. Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing; appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain. Ample are time and space - ample the fields of Nature. The body, sluggish, aged, cold - the embers left from earlier fires, the sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual; to frozen clods ever the spring’s invisible law returns, with grass and flower and fruits and corn.
Appearance | Birth | Body | Force | Law | Life | Life | Nature | Nothing | Object | Space | Time | Wisdom | World |
Punctuated equilibria [is] the abrupt appearance of life everywhere in the fossil record… suggest evolution has taken place in major creative episodes in different times and place, but with huge periods of stability in between. New species, then, have formed in those episodes during thousands rather than millions of years. This is often called the “lucky monster” theory.
Appearance | Evolution | Life | Life |
Peace is more than simply the absence of aggression and war. Peace transcends the end of a conflict or a statement of policy. While we may force the outward appearance of peace upon a people or a nation, it is the underlying thinking that must change to create a true and lasting peace.
Absence | Aggression | Appearance | Change | Force | Peace | People | Policy | Thinking | War |
The philosophical and religious West has been axial for almost 3,000 years. In the axial model, a sharp distinction was made between this world and a world beyond, and the idea arose that, although, we are in this world, we are not of this world. According to this model, human life is a journey that leads us from appearance to reality, bondage to liberation, confusion to insight, and darkness to light.
Appearance | Darkness | Distinction | Insight | Journey | Life | Life | Light | Model | Reality | World |
The appearance of impropriety is itself the impropriety.
The world is governed more by appearance than realities so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it.
Appearance | World |
Man is, indeed, a being apart, since he is not influenced by the great laws which irresistibly modify all other organic beings… Man has not only escaped natural selection himself, but he is actually able to take away some of that power from nature which before his appearance she universally exercised.
Appearance | Man | Nature | Organic | Power |
Truth is a qualification which applies to appearance alone. Reality is just itself, and it is nonsense to ask whether it be true or false. Truth is the conformation of appearance to reality.
Appearance | Nonsense | Reality | Truth |
Alice Walker, fully Alice Malsenior Walker
People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing actually to remain fools.
Appearance | People |
It is a tribute to the strength of the sheer craving for freshness, that change, whose justification lies in aim at the distant ideal, should be promoted by Art which is the adaptation of immediate Appearance for immediate Beauty. Art neglects the safety of the future for the gain of the present. In doing it is apt to render its Beauty thin. But after all, there must be some immediate harvest. The Good of the Universe cannot lie in indefinite postponement.
Appearance | Art | Beauty | Change | Future | Good | Justification | Present | Strength | Universe | Art | Beauty |
We must grasp the number of aims entertained by those who argue as competitors, and rivals to the death. These are five in number, refutation, fallacy, paradox, solecism, and fifthly to reduce the opponent in the discussion to babbling - i.e. to constrain him to repeat himself a number of times; or it is to produce the appearance of each of these things without the reality.
Aims | Appearance | Death | Discussion | Fallacy | Paradox | Reality |
The alternative to the illusion of an ego is the Reality of inexhaustible, radiant Being. So long as the appearance of an ego remains, so long does the appearance of free will; in fact they are mutually dependent.
I am an infinitesimal and evanescent fragment in this vast universe. True, but it is no less true that this vast universe is an infinitesimal and evanescent appearance within me. What-is is just the same whether manifested in a universe or not. The pure sense of being that I feel just is; it is the same as what-is. To say that there is no “I” is the same as saying that there is nothing else.
Appearance | Nothing | Sense | Universe |